Categories Explained and Blog ... um... Direction?

Directionless Bloggery

It is 9am on a day when I have work in the evening, a time of day during which I would be a)sleeping b) whining about life using ink in a spiral-bound notebook or c) working out. It seemed like a journaling kind of day since it's all Edgar Allen Poe outside. (Gray, snow covered and crow-laden.)

This blog will not have a clear direction and purpose. There will be plenty about writing, creative projects, stuff that some of my wildly talented friends and acquaintances are doing, pop culture, and the gushy cheerleading of stuff I like. Maybe a purpose will reveal itself. When writing fiction I consider myself an exploratory writer more than a planner, so it stands to reason that I have to approach bloggery in the same way.

In defense of my directionless blog I would like to say that directionless does not mean that it has no purpose. I offer self-expression to the vicissitudes of the interweb deities in the interests of engaging with the world.

Dude. Seriously. I live in the middle of nowhere and I am not kidding about how crow-laden this place is. (sidenote: I heart birds)

Okay, on to the next topic....

Categories Explained

My guess is that most you who have landed here have found this via facebook, and if that is the case you will have noticed a fabulous fun game we're calling Categories. Categories, in its current form is a word association game with awards arbitrarily, whimsically granted by yours truly. This in and of itself is not particularly mysterious. I got the idea from a movie called Hard Core Logo which features a more classic version for a minute or two of screen-time. (The same film also sort of inspired a current collaborative project titled, for now, F*ck Sh*t *p, but that's a whole different blog topic. Also, "Hi, Bob!") Later I found out that some other friends played their own version of this in childhood, which is supercool imho. All of that is digression.

You guys know what categories is... I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "What in Plaid Brady Bunch Hell is yam salve?"

Yam Salve is one of the great mysteries of life.
The first person to mention Yam Salve in a way that relates to any given categories topic receives the Yam Salve Award, one of the highest honors a person can achieve in the world of Categories.

It has become the object of a cult, a cult that believes deeply in the curative powers of Yam Salve. The Yam Salve speaks through the Yam Salva, aided by the High Priest and Priestess of the Yam Salve Cult. True understanding of the Yam Salve leads to the Yam Salvation.

If there is any one thing that you need to know about Yam Salve is that you cannot mix Yam Salve with Awesomesauce because it could be world ending.

Also, alternative uses for yam salve was one of the first categories, which is what spawned all of this.

But there was a time before that, sometime between 1996 and 1998, a time when pagers were swiftly dying, cell-phone populations were on the increase and Mega fauna still roamed, a time in which Yam Salve was born.

The birthplace of yam salve is New York City in the midst of a radio convention.  The magical phrase was first uttered by a good friend of mine who wishes to remain anonymous. He liked the way the words sounded together, and for some reason this was, to us, the funniest thing ever. So, we ignored the rock stars and sat in a corner drinking our alcoholic beverages and screaming about yam salve all night.

I think I will leave it to the High Priestess and Priest of the Yam Salve Cult to make that story of origin sound more like mythology and less like a "Do you remember that one time you got drunk?" story.

Also, this is proof that the words of the High Priest of Yam Salve are true. "Inside jokes with Reggie never die."